When Vietnam did what the West failed to do.
On Christmas Day 1978, 150,000 Vietnamese troops stormed into Cambodia and crushed the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, the architect of one of the 20th century’s most horrific genocides, which slaughtered nearly one-quarter of Cambodia’s population through mass executions, starvation, forced labor, and disease.
In just two weeks, Vietnamese forces, backed by Cambodian dissidents, seized Phnom Penh and toppled the brutal government, effectively ending the killing fields.
Yet, in a stunning display of Cold War cynicism, remnants of Pol Pot’s forces fled to the jungles and waged a decade-long guerrilla war, bankrolled primarily by China and covertly supported by the United States and Thailand.
These nations supplied the Khmer Rouge with weapons, training, logistical bases, and even diplomatic legitimacy at the United Nations, giving a lifeline to the very perpetrators of genocide.
What began as a military intervention that stopped a genocide in its tracks was condemned as “aggression,” while those who armed its survivors were hailed as defenders of “freedom.” History has rarely seen such moral inversion.